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Five seasons is usually where a sitcom starts revealing exactly how much gas is left in the tank. Familiar character combinations get paired up again, old conflicts return in slightly different clothes, and the same locations start to feel more like sets than places where these people actually live and work. ABBOTT ELEMENTARY shows a few signs of reaching that stage during its fifth season, but what's impressive is how quickly Quinta Brunson and her writers seem to recognize the danger and start messing with their own formula. They literally move the school into a mall.

I thought a lot about how I wanted to approach this review. FRIDAY THE 13TH is my favorite horror franchise; I love the lore, the cheesiness, and the brutality. There was point while watching CRYSTAL LAKE, I realized my problem wasn’t that the series wasn’t giving me enough Pamela Voorhees. It was most definitely giving me the version I wanted to see, including her grief, deterioration, and gradual evolution toward the woman we know she becomes. The problem is that every time that part of the story starts becoming really interesting, the series seems determined to build something else around it.

I miss Taylor Sheridan making movies. That thought followed me through almost all of THE MADISON, which probably isn't fair to a television series that largely succeeds at what it sets out to do. Sheridan has become one of television's most prolific creators, but before THE MADISON, I somehow hadn't watched any of his many series. My connection to him comes from the movies, particularly the three films he has called his thematic American Frontier trilogy: SICARIO, HELL OR HIGH WATER, and WIND RIVER. Taken together, they're phenomenal.

The murder in DTF ST. LOUIS honestly feels like a trick to get us through the door. Steven Conrad gives us a dead body, two detectives, shifting timelines, unreliable accounts of what happened, and plenty of questions about how everything went wrong, but solving the case gradually becomes less important than understanding why these people were vulnerable to blowing up their lives in the first place.

I owe CARRIE (Mike Flanagan, Prime Video, and basically everyone associated with this) an apology. From the moment this series was announced, I was 110% convinced that it captured exactly what frustrates me so much about Hollywood's obsession with remaking things that don't need remaking, and I don't think I've ever been happier to discover how completely wrong I was.

There’s something wonderfully ridiculous about watching two grown adults bury homemade creatures in horse manure because they might be able to predict the future. SMALL PROPHETS never treats that ridiculousness as a problem, nor does it spend much time trying to convince us that any of this makes sense. Mackenzie Crook instead asks us to accept that something impossible might be growing inside a suburban garden shed and then turns his attention toward the people desperate enough to believe in it.

The scariest thing inside New Hyde Psychiatric Hospital isn't necessarily the creature hiding somewhere within its walls. THE TERROR: DEVIL IN SILVER repeatedly makes paperwork, medication schedules, locked doors, indifferent employees, and the simple inability to convince anyone that you're telling the truth feel just as threatening. That's where this third installment of THE TERROR is at its strongest, and also why its more traditional supernatural horror occasionally feels like it's interrupting the better story.

THE PAPER doesn't need to become THE OFFICE to be successful, and in season 2 it finally seems to understand that well enough to stop reminding us so often that the connection exists, and the result is a more confident workplace comedy built around people becoming great at the jobs they originally stumbled into.

Twenty-three seasons into a television series, simply continuing to function would qualify as an accomplishment. NCIS: SEASON TWENTY-THREE does considerably more than that. Rather than treating its age as something to hide, the season repeatedly reaches into the show's history, pulls old relationships and unfinished business back into the present, and uses them to remind us why these characters have survived for more than two decades.

When you put Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson together on screen, you don't really need any help convincing anyone they're friends. BROTHERS understands that from the jump and skips the unnecessary effort that you’d normally need to fabricate their connection, and instead asks how much trouble it can cause when their very real relationship gets dropped into a completely fictional mess. To be honest, when I first read the synopsis for the series, I thought it was a typo; I love how layered and meta the idea is.

There may not be another actor working today who can complain as entertainingly as Billy Bob Thornton. Give him bad news, an impossible business problem, an irritating family member, or somebody who doesn't understand the oil industry, and LANDMAN can happily spend several minutes letting Tommy Norris explain exactly why everything is terrible. Thornton somehow makes that entertaining long after the novelty should've worn off, which remains one of the biggest reasons this show works at all.

Back in the day, there was a time when TV didn't need to convince you that every comedy was redefining the format. Sometimes funny people were enough, and PERFECT STRANGERS understood the assignment. Eight seasons and 150 episodes later, the moving pieces behind the show become incredibly easy to recognize. Bronson Pinchot and Mark Linn-Baker remain funny enough together that recognizing why doesn't necessarily stop it from working.

Three seasons into TULSA KING, Dwight Manfredi doesn’t just feel like a New York gangster stranded in Oklahoma. Tulsa belongs to him now, or at least he certainly acts as if it does, and that change gives Season Three a different feeling from the fish-out-of-water comedy that originally made the series so easy to enjoy. Dwight has a business, employees, allies, rivals, family, and enough people expecting a cut of something that his exile has effectively become another criminal kingdom.

Harry Da Souza spends a lot of his time in MOBLAND walking into rooms where everyone else has already made the worst possible decision. Tom Hardy plays him like a man who has accepted that this is his life, calmly surveying whatever disaster the Harrigan family has created and figuring out how many threats, favors, lies, or bodies will be required to make it disappear. This isn’t to be confused with the 2023 John Travolta and Stephen Dorff film MOB LAND (although, yes, this is confusing.)

LAST SEEN has the kind of premise that could become ridiculous almost instantly if that emotional foundation isn't there. Eleven years after Ian Ridley's young daughter Maggie disappeared, the former detective is working as a police dispatcher when a terrified teenage girl calls for help. Ian hears something nobody else can hear with the same certainty.

STAR TREK: THE ORIGINAL SERIES premiered on September 8, 1966, and 60 years later all 79 episodes return together on Blu-ray in commemorative packaging celebrating the series that started everything. Six decades of STAR TREK TV, movies, characters, conventions, collectibles, and generations of fans can all be traced back to these three seasons. Watching them now, it’s remarkable not only how influential the series became but how entertaining so much of it remains.

By the time CHAD POWERS ended its first season, the disguise had already stopped being the whole joke. Russ Holliday could keep fooling strangers, but the people who actually knew Chad were getting close enough to notice that something didn’t add up. Season 2 picks up that pressure rather than finding six new ways for a wig and prosthetics almost to fall off, and that gives the series a little more substance. Russ is no longer simply trying to get another chance at football. He has built relationships as Chad, enjoyed success as Chad, and discovered that people may actually prefer the person he becomes when he isn’t being Russ.

Lucy Lawless can walk Alexa Crowe into a room full of suspects and make it seem as though she’s already figured out which three people are lying before anyone has finished introducing themselves. Five series into MY LIFE IS MURDER, that confidence has become the show’s greatest advantage. Alexa is smart without constantly needing the scripts to announce it, sarcastic without becoming exhausting, and just difficult enough that the people around her have learned when to push back. Lawless knows this woman completely by now, and Series 5 gets plenty of mileage from watching a performer this comfortable with a character.

Kayce Dutton has always felt more natural when he has a purpose, rather than when he’s tasked with carrying on his family legacy. MARSHALS recognizes that, removing the Yellowstone Ranch from his life and giving Luke Grimes a character who can move forward without being pulled back into the same Dutton family conflicts every episode. The problem is that the new job waiting for Kayce feels much more like a traditional crime drama and is far removed from the world we first met him in.

REACHER: SEASON THREE puts Jack Reacher in an unfamiliar position. Instead of charging directly into trouble, he has to work undercover inside a criminal organization, forcing him to hold back when nearly every instinct tells him to do the opposite. That restriction gives the season a stronger foundation. Reacher remains capable of dismantling almost anyone placed in front of him, but he can’t operate entirely according to instinct. He has to maintain a cover identity, earn the trust of people he intends to expose, and decide when violence will protect the operation rather than satisfy his anger.

ALLEY CATS refusing to turn the animals into adorable little humans (well, for the most part). Gus and his friends scratch, hunt, fight, sleep wherever they can, and approach most living creatures as possible food or competition. They can discuss death, relationships, and the meaning of existence, but those conversations never stop them from behaving like cats.

The third season gave Ted Lasso an ending everyone deserved. Ted returned to his son, Richmond continued without him, and nearly every major character stepped toward a future that no longer required the series to follow along. Bringing everyone back three years later could have exposed the conclusion as a temporary pause inserted before Apple backed another truck of money onto the pitch. The first four episodes of Season 4 understand that concern, and the best decision they make is refusing to pretend it doesn’t exist. Jason Sudeikis thought TED LASSO was done after season three, and it wasn’t until he knew more stories needed to be told.

FUTURAMA no longer has to prove that it can return from cancellation. At this point, resurrection has become part of its production cycle. The harder question is whether another season can justify diving deeper into Fry, Leela, Bender, and the Planet Express crew after they’ve already received several perfectly good endings. Across the first six episodes of Season 14, the answer is an encouraging yes.

Gotham doesn’t become safer when Batman “begins.” It becomes stranger, as ordinary corruption gives way to criminals who understand that a memorable identity can be as powerful as a gun. BATMAN: CAPED CRUSADER enters its second season with the city adapting to its masked vigilante, while Bruce Wayne remains several steps behind everyone else in understanding what Batman is doing to him.

FURIOUS does something unique; it takes anger and puts it under a microscope. Who gets to carry it, who gets punished for showing it, and who learns to turn it into a weapon. That gives this eight-episode drama more of a charge than the usual hunter-and-hunted thriller setup. The series still has crime scenes, bodies, agency friction, and the pull of two women moving toward each other from opposite sides of the law. Underneath all of that, though, FURIOUS is most interested in what happens when justice starts to look too small for the damage being measured. And in the end, the series makes you question everything that came before it in the best way possible.